June 30, 2001:

I don't use Office XP 2002 and probably never
willditto Windows XP, due out in October. Why? Microsoft persists
in building in an "activation" system that will disable your
copy of the software when it detects that the hardware profile has changedsomething
as simple as a new hard drive will do it, and Microsoft has said nothing
at all about what triggers a reaction from the software. If you change
your hardware, you have to call Microsoft to get a new activation code,
or you're personally screwed by Bill Gates & Crew. (And how long do
you expect you'll have to sit helplessly on hold while MS attempts to
field tens of millions of reactivation requests from hapless XP users?)
A
recent report by ZDNet's Dave Coursey showed that this code is buggy
enough to be triggered for no reason, on a laptop on whch nothing
had been changed, and that worries me. Products containing "guard
dog" code like this are fragile, and my time is too valuable
to have to absorb the hit while waiting for Microsoft to put right something
that they screwed over to begin with. Can I bill them my usual rate ($150/hour)
for time spent on hold trying to get my software working again? Obviously
not.

So the answer is quite simple: Boycott XP. Period. Don't buy it,
and don't buy hardware on which it has been installed. If enough people
get screwed this way (and if enough people of means file lawsuits over it,
which for a change I hope they do) perhaps we can bury this sort of thing,
like we buried key diskettes so many years ago.

June 29, 2001:

The feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, and given
that I arrived in the world on this date (a month late, and pretty large
considering the size of my diminutive mother) the reason my middle name
is Peter. I'm glad they chose him, as St. Paul crosses the line for me
theologically in a number of places. Peter was a better choice. After
all, he was bald (I'm not sure how we know, but all early depictions of
himsome of them very earlyshow him with as little hair
as I have) and sometimes more than a little confused about what was asked
of him.

But it's always puzzled me why they put these two very famous saints
together on one day, when Scripture clearly shows that they loathed each
other. All the other apostles and major saints have their own feast days,
shared (if at all) by minor saints that no one these days has ever heard
of. Perhaps it was God's way of telling them, "Go to your room and
don't come out until you can get along. And don't make me come down there!"

There's a fascinating book about how we recovered what are almost certainly
the bones of St. Peter, which involved the excavation of what is probably
the first Christian church in Rome, erected in a graveyard in the late years
of the first century AD. This little church was buried beneath two different
basilicas called St. Peters, and was found directly beneath the main altar
of the current megachurch. The book is The Bones of St. Peter, by
John Evangelist Walsh. It's now out of print, but although it's the least
common of Walsh's many books, you can generally find copies on Bibliofind
or Alibris. Highly recommended.

June 28, 2001:

Acme Rent-A-Car of New Haven CT has an interesting
scam going: They've installed GPS receivers on all their newer higher-end
cars, and the cars use GPS to monitor how fast they're going. Go over
the speed limit, and it's recordedand when you turn the car in,
Acme adds hefty fines to your bill for each and every instance where
you exceeded the limit. Supposedly, Acme wants to protect their cars,
but I powerfully suspect the motivation is the same as that impelling
local governments to use photo radar: It's "free money" and
requires no human intervention to collect it.

Now, I suspect that this little piece of technology grift will be challenged
in court, and I also suspect that once word gets around, Acme rentals are
going to amsymptotically approach zero. Do what I'm doing and put Acme Rent-A-Car
on your Never Do Business Ever list. I consider this sort of arrogance a
mortal sin, and unlike the Church, I don't provide any means of confession
or redemption.

June 27, 2001:

This is as good a time as any to voice discontent
with a growing curse of home computing: The proliferation of wall-wart
power supplies. In the old days, things that needed power plugged into
the 120V mains and converted things down to 12VDC or whatever they needed
internally. Now, it seems, every damfool peripheral you buy comes with
this big bulky lump with prongs that plugs into an outlet--and blocks
the two outlets on either side of it.

I have a pretty sophisticated setup here, with two scanners, two printers,
amplified speakers, a USB hub, a router and some other stuff, all of which
demand their own elbows-out place at the electrical trough. In times past,
you could even plug your monitor into the pack of your PC, but no more.
So the ratsnest of wires behind my computer table here is frightening,
when you add in the cable to the roof antenna through which I access the
Internet, the phone cord, and umpty-ump USB cables.

But I did
find some help: A very clever extension cord with a triangular head designed
specifically to accept wall warts and keep them out of one another's way.
It's by Fellowes, and it contains a surge protector, eight outlets, plus
in/out jacks to divert surges from your telephone line. The odd shape
is ideal; see the photo at left. I bought it at OfficeMax and my guess
is it's available at any large computer or office supplies retailer.

Another solution that should be used more is to make the transformer cases
slender and longer, with the pins on the narrow face, so that the transformer
part doesn't block outlets to either side. I have one of these, and it came
with my Cisco Aironet access point. There's no reason this shape could not
be a standard. Let us pray for sense hereand do whatever is necessary
to keep our electronics fed.

June 26, 2001:

I
finally got a clear night from which to view Mars, but I had forgotten how
unsettled the air is over Phoenix at dusk after a hot summer's day. I got
the big scope put together, and it worked as well as it always has--but
of course, the poor thing can only do the best it can with the air that
it happens to be looking through. And that air was the air rising over the
blistering hot clot of concrete and asphalt we call the Phoenix Metropolitan
Area, which had been soaking up solar heat all day. I am located to the
north of nearly all of that metro area, and Mars was low in the southern
sky, just to the east of Scorpius. So I was looking through miles of heat-tormented
air, and the image of Mars was nowhere near as clear as it was back in 1988,
when we last got this close to the Red Planet. I glimpsed some of the dark
areas, and what may have been one of its polar dry ice caps. But overall
it was a bitter disappointment. I did learn a few things that could be better
done with the refurbed scope, and have a list of improvements to be made.
I think, however, that I'm going to wait for slightly cooler weather to
implement them.

June 25, 2001:

From the ASPCA comes the following stack-rank
popularity list of pet names. How many creatures have borne these names
in your house?

We had Max until just a couple of months ago, and when I was a kid I had
a mutt named Smokey. We've known a fair number of other Maxes, a couple
of Sams, and more than one Lady. So I guess it's all for real. But cripes,
who would name a cat Kitty? (Or, worse, a dog?)

June 24, 2001:

I
just bought an HP ScanJet 5370C, and it's been wonderful so far. I haven't
had a flatbed scanner since my old one broke the middle of last year,
and I've been wedged waiting for something to appear that might conceivably
enable me to scan the old 120-format slides my father took in huge numbers
with his Graflex between 1954 and 1968. The 5370 comes with something
very useful: A backlight attachment that can be placed on the glass over
a positioning template when you need to scan anything transparent.

Installation
was trivial and well-documented: I installed the software that came on
CD, plugged it in via the included USB cable, and the system (running
Windows 2000 professional) recognized the scanner instantly and went to
work. I tested it on a number of things, both conventional photos and
also some ancient negatives as well as those 120-format slides. It handled
everything beautifully. One of the slides is shown at left, uncropped
and un-fooled-with in any other way. (I'm in that picture somewhere, along
with most of my Chicago-based cousins, one of whom was and remains a nun.)
The brown spot at the bottom is a scorch on the emulsion; not sure from
what. The resolution is tremendous, and the color reproduction seems near
perfect. There was some trouble getting the slide arranged square on the
glass, but I could solve that by cutting a template out of cardboard or
thin plastic. One such template is provided to align 35mm slides and another
for 35mm negatives. Both work very well.

I was
most pleased with its ability to turn a b/w negative into a nice print.
I have a box full of old negatives that as best I know have not been printed,
and some of them are very nice. The one shown here is of the house my
parents bought immediately after their wedding in 1949, and in which I
lived until I left home at age 23. It was a view camera negative, 3"
X 5", and I don't know who took it, but it's a very rare photo of
both my parents as young marrieds. Many other such odd-sized negatives
remain in the box, including a lot of photos of old steam locomotives.
(My father was a major steam fan, though I never knew he had a view camera.)
The conversion from negative scan to positive image is nearly instantaneous
and needed no tweaking in any way. Overall I'm extremely impressed with
the included software, and have not yet explored it fully. There's a FAX
package and an image organizer, neither of which I've tried, though the
organizer is something I need very badly, even more so once all those
slides start becoming files on disk.

If you don't have a USB-capable machine, not to sweat: It also has a parallel
interface and comes with a parallel cable. It's nice to see hardware that
"just works." This one does. So far, highly recommended.

June 23, 2001:

Dreams fascinate me, and as a general follower
of Jung I feel that they represent the irruption into our minds of archetypes
from the collective unconscious that are somehow related to our daily
experience. Problem is, the archetypes I experience are strange indeed,
and aren't listed in the multitude of dream books you can find in the
new Age Section down at Borders. I wonder sometimes, whether these books
are pious frauds with no connection to what people experience in dreams,
or whether my dreams are just peculiarly freaky. A typical dream book,
for example, suggests that dreaming about snakes suggests somethingnot
that any two books agree on just what. My problem is that my dreams are
nowhere near that simple. I sometimes wish that I could just dream about
snakes. Or just about horses. Or just about water. No luck.

An example from last night, and this is fairly typical, at least in terms
of its bizarreness: I dreamed that a woman named Gail whom I worked with
sixteen years ago brought me her shoe and told me it was broken. It was
a bizarre shoe to begin with; kind of like a black Sixties spike-heel
pump only with about ten spike heels rather than one. I thought it looked
a little like a meat tenderizer. (My dream book has no listing for dreaming
about meat tenderizers nor things that resemble them.) And although she
didn't explain in what way it was broken, I seemed to know, because I
unscrewed the bottom and looked inside. (Don't ask me to explain what
that means. My dreams present an extraordinarily rubbery reality.) And
inside I found the problem: clots of dried-out pasta stuck to the bottom.
(My dream book has no listing for dreaming about pasta, either dried or
cooked.) I tried to explain this to her, but was stopped cold by my inability
to remember the names for the types of pasta I had found. I thought that
the twisty-looking pasta might be gnocchior was it rotini? I drove
myself nuts in the dream trying to figure out what types of pasta were
stuck inside the shoe, to absolutely no avail. And I was raging against
this peculiar inner ignorance when I woke up, furious.

Needless to say, my dream book has no listing for dreaming about being unable
to remember what different types of pasta are called, whether they are stuck
inside bizarre shoes or not. So what the hell good are all those dream books?
I should write something called The Real Dream Book, which explains
the meaning hidden in the things that people really dream about...this
being a good example. (Surely you've had this same dream, no?) I'd be rich
in an instant.

June 22, 2001:

This
is nuts. Here we have the best opposition of Mars since 1988, and here I
am in Arizona, where it's clear almost all the time, and the last several
nights have been...cloudy. Or lousy with monsoon lightning storms. Mars
is very close to the winter solstice, meaning it's very low in the south,
and has been down in the clouds every night since we got home from our last
trip. I spent a great deal of time and effort getting the big scope refurbed
and functional for this opposition, (see my entry for December 30, 2000)
and if the weather pattern doesn't break soon, I won't see it at all. This
is not a normal pattern for Phoenix in June. We generally get monsoons in
mid-July through the end of August or mid-September, and at those times
there are generally storm clouds zipping around, especially in early evening
when the sun is gone and the air begins to cool off and precipitate. This
year the monsoons came just in time to scrag the opposition of Mars. It
is to chew scrap iron.

June 21, 2001:

Not having children, Carol and I have ducked
the great paradox of teaching kids about sex: How to make it sound positive
and good without them immediately wanting to go off and do it. Most of
the Boomers grew up with seriously mixed messages about sex. Some of us
were taught it was good, some of us were taught it was extremely problematic,
and most of us (me included) were taught nothing at allwith only
parental example to guide us. (And that was a tremendously mixed bag.)

Preaching about sex isn't quite the same thing as preaching about alchohol
and tobacco. When handled correctly, sex is a compulsion toward wholeness,
and wholeness is something we need terribly in today's world. And although
I always get in trouble when I say so, I'm not sure we can insist that
people be virgins until they've already made a lifetime committment to
one another. A counselor I spoke to not long ago indicated that the vast
majority of marital problems she has seen in her career involve sex at
the bottom of itusually a woman who loses interest early in her
marriage, or who couldn't get interested after the delicious buzz of infatuation
fades away. People plainly shouldn't get married immediately after meetingwith
Carol and me it was seven years!but can we expect people to court
for years without testing the waters of sexual compatibility along with
everything else?

Obviously, most do. And many of those are very young. They are not attempting
sex because they were told to or told not to. They are attempting sex because
they can, and because the dark cloud of sin has been removed from
the subject. This being the case, what can we tell them to allow them to
keep the value in the experience while coming to know whether a potential
partner sees sex in a compatible way? Until we solve this problem, counselors
will have lots of business, and the misery index of modern life will remain
pegged at the high end.

June 20, 2001:

Free Web culture has suffered numerous setbacks
in recent weeks. Suck, which has been
with us for at least six years, is now into what may well be permanent
reruns. (Currently posted stories originally appeared in 1997.) Similarly
venerable Feed is "on ice"
and frozen at June 1, 2001. And Salon
is in terrible fiscal shape, according to a recent newspaper article in
(I think) USA Today. (I read it in an airport. Should have taken
it with me.) Salon may have brought trouble on itself; the left-of-center
e-mag reportedly pays its staffers in the "high five or low six figures."
Maybe that's what you need to do when you're based in San Francisco, where
everybody with more style than sense seems to want to live. But if you're
pushing an e-magazine, why be in San Francisco? Surely there are other
places with good writersRochester, New York comes to mind, where
you can still find decent houses for under $100,000. I lived there for
six years, and the place was crawling with writers! For that matter, why
do writers have to live anywhere in particular at all? This is an e-mag,
people! Virtual community! Place doesn't matter!

Unless, of course, you're running a hip e-magazine. Then it's apparently
San Francsico or nothing. Salon is rapidly opting for nothing, and I confess
that when it goes I will miss it.

June 19, 2001:

Another
very minor note on the flight back from Denver yesterday. Next to us was
sitting a young woman (college age or close to it) and when she kicked off
her sandals and crossed her legs, I noticed that her toenails were decorated
in elaborate patterns with…rhinestones! Must be hell on pantyhose..but more
to the point, isn't that a lot of trouble to go through for something that
almost can't be seen (and certainly not appreciated) until you're wedged
into an airline seat and practically sitting in the lap of total strangers?
Or is this simply one more proof that I'm getting old and stodgy?

June 18, 2001:

Flew
home today from Denver (that's why nothing's been posted here for about
ten days), and I confess I'm not radically pleased with United Airlines.
I bought the tickets five weeks ago, and when Carol and I get to the airport
almost 90 minutes prior to flight time, they tell us they can't give us
seats together. Five weeks! What, then, does it take? After I ranted a little
they moved us so that we could be together, but it still rankles. Could
that many people have gotten to the airport ahead of us? Or is something
going on here that I just don't understand?

June 15, 2001:

We were sitting around this evening having supper
with some Old Catholic priests and bishops, and some question came up
that could only be answered by looking up chapter and verse in the New
Testament. So one of the priests hauls out his Palm Pilot and begins frantically
tip-tapping in a search query. While he was tapping away with his stylus,
an older clergyman dipped into his pocket and pulled out a very small
printed edition of the New Testament, and in bare seconds zeroed in on
the passage in question. Admittedly, it helps to know the material, but
in truth there's something kind of lame about the stylus interface to
PalmOS. One would think something the size of a cellphone could be raised
to the lips and told, Locate the passage discussing 'the peace that
surpasseth all understanding.' It seems we've been on the edge of
victory in voice recognition for some time. We're still not therenor
even close.

It was, however, wild to see something like a Palm Pilot stuffed with three
(three!) translations of the full Bible, plus the proceedings of
the Concordat of Worms (don't even ask!) and scads of additional historical
documents of a religious nature. It serves to remind us that text is
compact. It's pictures and music that take up space.

June 13, 2001:

We're
in Denver for a few days to attend Catholic Convergence 2001, a gathering
of Old Catholic clergy and lay enthusiasts like me to share war stories
and plan global domination. I rented a mid-size car, but Hertz ran out of
them and told me I would have to take a Jeep Grand Cherokee instead. Now,
I just traded in my 1996 Jeep after it couldn't stay out of the shop for
more than a couple of weeks at a time, and it was interesting to drive the
2001 version of what was almost precisely the same model. The increased
cheapness of the device was obvious. There is only one keyhole, on the driver's
side. Rental car companies don't use crickets (those wireless key thingies
so common these days) and I have been in the habit of opening the car door
for Carol before I get in myself. Not having a cricket or a passenger door
keyhole means I have to open my door first, hit the unlock button, and then
run around and open the door for Carol. We bent the knee to practicality
and she just gets in on her ownlanding one more blow against what
may still remain of chivalry. Yet another loss is the CD player. It was
standard on the Grand Cherokee in 1996. Optional now. Same with powered
seats. Yank and pull is now the rule. About all I liked about
the Jeep I rented was its color: A deep and sparkly electric blue. Not real
practical in the Phoenix area, but it was gorgeous in the perfect Denver
weather we had. Best of all: After four days I could give it back to Hertz!

June 12, 2001:

Before
the theater began rolling Evolution yesterday, an extremely peculiar
item played, mixed in with the movie trailers and the increasingly present
commercials. Without any real indication of what was up, we're treated to
scenes of a thirty-ish woman stepping out about town with...a female manikin.
She and her manikin girlfriend do lots of girl things together, even though
the manikin (whose name, I believe, is Joyce) gets hit by a cab in one scene,
losing an arm and a leg, and then gets its foot set on fire while the gleeful
twosome is sitting by a bonfire at the beach. In the background a song is
playing: My Best Friend Is a Manikin. The (real) woman's boyfriend
or husband (not made clear) attempts to convince her that her girlfriend
is a manikin, and the woman freaks out. It's all very strange and darkly
disturbing, and it goes on for a couple of agonizing minutes before we realize
that this is a commercial for a magazine. The magazine is called
Lucky. It's about...shopping. It is apparently targeted at women
so stupid they can't understand that they've been hauling a one-legged manikin
around town as though it were her best girlfriend. Maybe it's supposed to
be funny, and I'm just too old to appreciate the humor. But if I were a
woman, I would be most insulted. I'm not sure if I have any women
readers, but if I do and if any of you have seen this work of idiocy, please
let me know what you think.

June 11, 2001:

Saw Evolution. Well, answer me this:
Is it a parody of a shlocky Fifties monster movie, or is it actually
a schlocky Fifties monster movie? I still can't decide. It's funny in
parts, though not as funny as it ought to be. It has all the gross-outs
and scatological humor that you'd want to toss in to attract hordes of
12-year-old boys, but what was missing was simple cleverness in scripting.
It has a handful of good jokes, but loads of sites for potential jokes,
none of which were seized upon.

What Evolution does have is very nice special effects; what we (as
12-year-old boys in 1964) would have described as "good monsters." There
is the obligatory schlock science (10 base pairs in their DNA rather than
our 4but does that guarantee faster evolution? I don't think so…)
and the obligatory scientific epiphany toward the end that leads to the
aliens' demise. Selenium! Of course! Selenium kills them! What happens next
is one of the few really truly hilarious things in the whole shebang, and
it's far from clear that what is delivered was worth the $8.50 a head Carol
and I paid to see it. Good monsters. Bad writing. No breasts. Joe-Bob says:
Your call.

June 9, 2001:

Here's
a brilliant challenge to the biogenic theory of "fossil fuels" generation
posed by Thomas Gold in his book The Deep Hot Biosphere: We know
that methane is seeping out of the ground above untapped natural gas fields.
We can measure itmethane can be detected with great accuracy, at concentrations
of only a few parts per million. So we can calculate that a given natural
gas field loses a certain number of cubic feet of gas per year. We also
understand very thoroughly the decay processes that yield methane gas from
decaying vegetation. We know, in other words, how many tons of vegetation
it takes to make how many cubic feet of methane. We know through various
means how long ago the vegetation now decaying into methane gas was laid
downand it wasn't yesterday. If the rate of seepage is fairly constant
(and it seems to be) we can extrapolate backwards through time to when the
ancient swamps were finally buried, and y'know what? All the gas should
be long gone by now, unless that layer of decaying weeds was miles
thickand it wasn't. The ancient Earth was fecund, but not that
fecund. So where's the gas coming from? Read the bookit's a marvelous
concept, and very hard to argue with.

June 8, 2001:

I
dislike big cities for a number of reasons, and my current visit to Chicago
has made yet another one clear. In most city neighborhoods you now need
resident stickers to park on the streetsand there are no other places
to park. I had a spare hour today and I wanted to walk around in the neighborhood
where my father was born and grew upon a little street called Olive
Avenue on the north side, near Clark Streetbut there was nowhere I
could legally park. The streets were for the most part empty, a car here
and car there, but all the space was reserved for residents. I said screw
it and left, with a feeling of abundant disgust. What if I lived there and
wanted friends to come visit? What ever happened to the concept of "public
spaces?" Big cities suck. Let me out of here!

June 7, 2001:

Have
just finished Thomas Gold's book The Deep Hot Biosphere. Whoa!
This was a surprise, and one of the most skull-rearranging books I've
poured into my head in a good long while. Definitely get it and read it
if you care about energy, or if you're a contrarian…or both. Gold is not
a nuthe's a Princeton physicist and well respected in nearly all
scientific circles. In his book, however, he makes a case against something
that has long been considered unchallengeable scientific dogma: That fossil
fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) are without exception the products
of decaying animal and vegetable material.

Gold has another theory: That with only a few exceptions, hydrocarbon
fuels are the result of primordial carbon, present since the formation
of the Earth, migrating from the deep crust and mantle to the Earth's
surface. The material starts its journey as methane, and gradually loses
hydrogen as it approaches the surface, so that the ultimate mix just underground
is coal (little or no hydrogen) petroleum (more hydrogen) and methane
(even more hydrogen.) Where does the hydrogen go? Primitive bacteria "eat"
it as their way of metabolizing food. Eat methane, shit propane; eat propane,
shit heptane, until eventually what is left is nearly all carbon, and
you have coal.

That's where the book's title comes from, and Gold presents a good deal
of evidence to support his theory, as well as the pretty astonishing fact
that he and a team of Swedish researchers drilled 5 klicks down into granite
in Sweden and pumped up 84 barrels of crude oil. There is no way for such
quantities of biologically generated hydrocarbons to be present in granite
5 klicks underground. He considers the theory proven, and is battling the
understandable resistance from scientists generally over his positionbut
you should read the book and decide for yourself. If Gold is right (as I
think he is) we're really not going to run out of fossil fuels anytime soon.
We still have the problem of CO2 emissions, but that's
a separate issue. I may have more to say about this book in upcoming days
as I meditate on its implications. Also, I have another book on the stack
that discusses at length the sorts of bacteria that can live at 150 degrees
C five klicks down and eat methane as though it were ambrosia. The book
is called Rare Earth. Looks like another winner. Stay tuned.

June 6, 2001:

The real problem with standardized testing in
schools, and one that gets little or no press, is that some kids just
don't test well. Both Carol and I were acquainted with people in college
who knew the material well but always panicked at test-time and did much
worse in terms of grades than their actual skills should have merited.
Some people perform well under pressure than others, and we have to ask
ourselves what the tests are supposed to be testing for: Cognitive skills,
or competition under pressure?

Carol's sister Kathy is a kindergarten teacher, and she spends a great
deal of time evaluating where her kids are on their development path,
one-on-one, with a sort of patience and tenderness that sets competition
and pressure aside and tries to see inside the child. I'm not sure how
well this would work with high schoolers, but I keep thinking that the
sort of high-stakes test ordeals we put our adolescents through don't
do justice to either the schools or the kids.

Which isn't to let the school systems off the hook. I'm still in favor
of privatizing our public schools (through a system that charters schools
under private ownership and funds them completely, while forbidding them
to charge additional tuition) simply to get the destructive politics and
government waste out of education. The current system is completely corrupt
and unworkable, and persists only because the teachers' unions have thrown
so much money into lobbying in their own defense. Schools must stand and
fall on their own merits. The question remains: How to measure those merits?

We may simply have to choose to put more time and effort into one-on-one
evaluations of educational achievement. Perhaps standardized testing shouldn't
take eight hours, but two weeksand if we have to run our schools through
the summer, well, there are worse things than that.

June 5, 2001:

Carol and her mom and I trucked down to the
Pickwick Theater in Park Ridge last night to see Bridget Jones' Diary.
The Pickwick is a fallen giant of cinema, a Roaring Twenties deco masterpiece
that was once and for many years the largest single movie theater in Chicago's
suburbs. We didn't appreciate its beauty as kids, for all the multitude
of times we were there, to see such kid classics as the Three Stooges
in Have Rocket, Will Travel, and cornball monster movies like The
Alligator People. There was a deco plaster nude standing guard in
front of the door to the men's room in the basement that engendered much
giggling and was the first sight of naked breasts that most of us Catholic
kids ever had. The balcony was virtually always marked "Closed"
and that says something about the state of the movie business, even in
1964.

Sometime
in the 80's the Pickwick was carved up into four different theaters: Two
tiny ones in the rear of the building, one large one that had once been
the main floor auditorium, and another one above the main floor that was
created by placing a new floor at about where the balcony had once ended,
incorporating the balcony and a new group of seats forward from the end
of the balcony. The breathtaking height of the ceiling, which once vaulted
to near-invisibility in the art deco appointments, is gone. I suppose
that's better than having the Pickwick converted to an indoor boutique
mall, but I miss its grandeur nonetheless.

As for Bridget Jones, well, about the best I can say is that it's
a light entertainment that might well be considered a sophisticate's version
of There's Something About Mary. Knuckleheaded British humor plays
well here in the Colonies, and of course when such a film appears you can
almost bet that Hugh Grant is there somewhere, and he is, playing the sleazy
editor-in-chief of a small press that publishes books with titles like Kafka's
Motorcycle. Bridget herself is a slightly overweight 32-year-old who
"smokes like a chimney, drinks like a fish, and dresses like her mother"
and wonders why she doesn't have a boyfriend. The reason, of course, is
that she prefers to sleep with idiots like the Hugh Grant character while
rebuffing a handsome if dull barrister who takes a shine to her. The whole
thing is less than it appears to be, and way too much of the humor centers
around the incongruity of hearing the F-word bandied about with an upper-class
British accent. There is no nudity whatsoever, and the sex is only discussed
in retrospect. It all ends well, and there's just enough silliness to make
me feel that I wasn't ripped off. And, of course, it was nice to be at the
Pickwick again, for old time's sake if nothing else.

June 4, 2001:

The overall mood at BEA was down. People aren't
buying books like they were last year, but then again, I don't think people
are buying anything like they were buying it last year. I was particularly
discouraged by how little SF was showcased. Tor had a table in the Holtzbrinck
booth, but they were literally the only SF imprint I saw there. Most publishers
said sales were down and returns were up.

I
spoke with the owner of Gourd Music
(see my entry for April 29, 2001) and he indicated that his business was
dangerously down, shut out of widespread retail distribution by the nature
of the record store business, which is mostly under the thumb of the major
labels who push mass-market rock to the exclusion of all else. Gourd is
a treasure, and I encourage you to buy their stuff, or we may lose them.
William Coulter has a number of new CDs in their Celtic line, and I will
order them as soon as I'm back home. His Shaker trilogy is now available
as a 3-CD gift set called the Simple
Gifts Collection, and for $29.95 is a steal, containing as it
does some of the most brilliant acoustic arrangements I have ever heard.
I've ordered their CDs direct many times and had no trouble.

On the upside, I met some people from Jossey-Bass,
a publisher of business, ethics, and religion titles, and they showed some
interest in my book on Old Catholicism. I'll be in touch with them after
I get back to Scottsdale, and will report my progress here.

June 3, 2001:

Here for BEA I'm staying at the Sheraton Chicago
Hotel and Towers, on East Water Street, overlooking the pristine (NOT!)
Chicago River. I don't recommend this hotel for a peculiar reason, one
that seems thoroughly out of sync with its $205/night cost: The heat/air
conditioning only works when the room deadbolt is thrownthat is,
when you're in the room.

This is not good. When I got here, the room was stifling. The window
opens slightly, but there are no screens, and given the recent wet weather
here I don't want to be swatting those famous Chicago mosquitos all night
long. So I had to wait until I got back from a dinner event to start cooling
the room off. The heat pump isn't especially potent, and it took until
3 ayem to get it acceptably cool in here. And sheesh, it's not even summer
yet.

I can understand the hotel's logic: For reasons unclear (everybody here
blames everybody else) energy prices are quite high in Chicago. They even
tack a $2.50 per day "energy assessment" onto your room chargeand
then make it impossible to use the energy to make the room comfortable
except when you're in the room, sweltering.

This is a tactic I would accept in a Motel 6. At the Sheraton, no. There
is a little microswitch in the deadbolt striker plate that the deadbolt
depresses to enable the heat pump. I could make a little block in the garage
in an hour to hold the switch closed while the room cools down and I'm elsewhere.
If I ever have to stay here again (the company chose the hotel; I didn't)
I will make such a block, and use it. For $205 a night, I deserve to sleep
cool.

June 2, 2001:

One thing I've been monitoring at BEA/ABA shows
for some years is the evolution of digital publishing and e-books. There
was an explosion of new technology in this area in the last couple of
years. Consolidation is beginning. The pugnacious Glassbook Reader (see
my entry for March 10) is now an Adobe product (the cleverly named Adobe
Reader), and some minor players are gone. The emphasis is now on software
rather than dedicated e-book readers like Rocket e-Book and Softbook.
Microsoft's Reader product was pretty lame when it was introduced, but
they're relentlessly working on it, and are now integrating it with their
e-commerce products. I was impressedit's come much farther than
Glassbook in less time.

But one
interesting new hardware device turned up this year: Franklin's eBookman,
which uses a proprietary OS rather than the ubiquitous PalmOS or Windows
CE.. It's a very slick PDA with a much larger display than Palm-based
devices, as well as 16-level graphics. (Palm devices use 2-level displays,
in that a pixel is either on or off.) Best of all, Franklin has recognized
that no one will buy a dedicated e-book reader that does nothing but read
e-books. So eBookman performs all expected PDA functions as welland
will play MP3s through an earphone as a bonus. (It has a Flash memory
slot into which you can plug up to 128 MB, which gives you some room for
music files if you want them.)

I was most impressed. The larger display and grayscale graphics made it
much easier on the eyes than my poor Visor, on which I am typing this entry.
It has some unique touches, like a little thumb knob on the right edge that
acts as a sort of jogger shuttle control to page up and down an e-book or
address book page. It has a unique means of software installation, too:
You connect it to a serial or USB port and log into a Web site with your
PC browser. The Web site squirts software into the deviceincluding
the operating system. Thereafter, you can log in periodically, and Franklin
will pipe software updates right down into your eBookman, including updates
to the OS itself. (PalmOS is stored in ROM and cannot be updated. Franklin's
OS is stored in Flash memory.) All in all, a very impresssive gadget, given
an SRP of only $229.

June 1, 2001:

At Book Expo America for the next few days.
This is the big US trade show for the book publishing industry. In years
past it was called the American Booksellers Association show (ABA) until
the ABA (an organization of mostly small, independent bookstores) sold
the show to a trade show promoter and ceased its longstanding sponsorship.

I've been attending the show pretty regularly since 1989, and it's been
intriguing to watch its gradual decline, which tracks the decline of the
independent bookstore pretty closely. The ABA show used to be the place
where small bookstores would establish relationships with publishers.
Publishers now establish relationships with the relatively few large book
retail chains as a precondition of doing business, and deal with independent
booksellers mostly through distributors like Ingram Book Company. The
need for shows like BEA is less and less urgent.

I've always been of two minds about this. The much-maligned big chains like
Borders and Barnes and Noble have brought a richness to book retailing that
never existed before. How could it? Small shops don't have the kind of capital
to stock 50,000 titles under one roof. On the other hand, small shops know
and love books in ways that the big chains can't equal, and I miss that
a lot. I don't have any solutions, and BEA is a shadow of what the ABA show
used to be. Publishers like Coriolis now go largely to cut foreign rights
deals with overseas publishersand to keep an eye on competitors. Publishing
people use it as a way to network for jobs. Everybody uses it as an opportunity
to schmooze and buy overpriced ice cream on their expense accounts. I often
wonder where it's all going, but the direction doesn't look like up to me.